NYT: Tucson bias was in our very genes.

Ah, the New York Times. Not only did their recent attempt to declare the Tucson shootings an episode of political violence spawned by right-wing rhetoric fail; it actually encouraged a minor episode of political violence spawned by left-wing rhetoric*. This has made the paper look even worse than usual, so they need a good excuse to explain away the problem. Said excuse? It’s all the fault of the media’s genetic condition.

Jerry Ceppos, dean of the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, said journalists’ impulse to quickly impose a frame on a story is “genetic.”

“Journalists developed automatic framing protocols generations ago because of the need to report quickly,” he said. “Today’s hyper-deadlines, requiring journalists to report all day long and all night long, made that genetic disposition even more dominant.”

I was unaware that the media was currently run by a secret elite of clans that are apparently so inbred that by now the latest generation universally shares the same genetic predisposition towards jumping the gun and blaming a Republican whenever anything goes wrong in the world.

Alternatively, please remember this the next time that the New York Times presumes to lecture you on science: the [expletive deleted] writing for it don’t even know the difference between the Lamarckian and the Darwinian theories of evolution.

More scorn here and here; the best thing that you can say for the “We have genetic damage!” defense is that, hey, it still beats the truth.